Order or Disorder
I have to admit that in the past I haven’t really bothered too much with the RTS genre on the PC, last ones I played were Dungeon Keeper 2, Command and Conquer 2, Dune 2000, Command and Conquer : Tiberian Sun and finally Warcraft 3 quite a bit as there was nothing else I fancied at the time. Other than that nothing at all that is classed as RTS since then. To get to grips with Winter Assault I have played Dawn of War for a good few hours to get used to the controls and the way the game works in itself before taking a look at Winter Assault for this review.
As I mentioned previously, this expansion allows you to play as the Imperial Guard. Now this takes away my usual tactics on an RTS which is to build hundreds of basic ground troops and tanks then do a charge at the enemy (a bit reminiscent of the bunnies on Full Throttle by Lucasarts all those years ago) and in most cases completely obliterating the enemy with ease. However, you can’t do that with Dawn of War or the Winter Assault Expansion Pack. You have a limit on the amount of troops or artillery you can have, forcing you to play a more tactical and strategic game and assemble a good selection of the various different military units if you want to succeed. Another thing worth mentioning is that the Imperial Guard are not anywhere near as powerful as the Space Marines, so once again a more tactical approach is a must. If you play online against other players the ‘build up and charge’ tactic will most likely not work at all as one of the new features on Winter Assault is that a lot of the more powerful units and artillery become available pretty soon after you build up your base. So once again you have to really think about the next move you will make or you could end up in a skirmish that could go on for hours if both sides just kept using the old take by force and numbers routine.
Click for larger imageWhen you start the single player campaign you have the option to run through a tutorial level which is basically a skirmish match against the computer. You get a voiceover telling you what the objectives are and how to accomplish them. Winter Assault’s tutorial is exactly the same as Dawn of War but it does introduce the Imperial Guard and some of the extra features available. One new feature is being able to build a squad of just the commanders like Commissionaires so you can have a really powerful command squad. Also, when you have a Commissionaire attached to the squad as well as a Sergeant, his special ability is to be able to execute one of the squad’s soldiers on the battlefield which makes the other men in the squad fight harder and also has the same effect on squads nearby. Nothing like getting the men to actually work harder !
One thing that has really drawn me into Winter Assault is the fact that when you actually start the single player campaign you have a choice of good or evil (or should evil be described as just plain nuts!). If you side with good you start the campaign off playing the Imperial Guard which is pretty similar to the original Dawn of War. However if you select to play as evil (known as Chaos) you start off playing as an Orc Warboss named Gorgutz. This is where the fun really is as far as I’m concerned! Once you finish that first scenario with Gorgutz you don’t carry on as the Orcs, you take control of the Chaos Space Marines. This time you have to hold back Gorgutz and his army of Orcs so you get to play both factions and it blends together seamlessly. Winter Assault doing this reminded me a lot of Warcraft 3 as that also jumps between factions at different times in the game to piece the story together.
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